The below video captures some of the sentiment of a few months ago, when concern that record global temperatures in the range of 1 degree Celsius above 1880s averages might result in harm to Egypt’s populace was widespread and growing:

(Egyptian residents feared the killing heat was coming back in May. Sadly, their concerns have born out as a powerful heatwave in July and August is resulting in tragic loss of life there. Video source here.)

It’s a hotter world we live in now. One in which any of us living on Earth are now four times as likely to experience a heatwave than we were during the 1880s. And at the most extreme end of this spectrum are the heatwave mass casualty events — which this year have been very numerous and widespread. Italy, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, India and Japan have now all experienced mass hospitalizations and deaths due to the excess heat of a world forced to rapidly warm by human fossil fuel emissions.

(Heat and humidity from a pool of anomalously hot ocean water is still blasting Japan, resulting in the hospitalization of an ever-rising number heatstroke victims. Sea surface temperatures remain in the range of 2-4 degrees Celsius above average as a heat dome high pressure system swelters Japan. Sea surface temperature anomaly map by Earth Nullschool.)

During this time, Tokyo shattered its record for longest period of 35 C (95 F) degree or hotter days running. The above 35 C readings extended for a full eight days from July 31 to August 7th. It’s high heat and humidity that resulted in hundreds of hospitalizations for that city alone. And though the heat has somewhat abated, temperatures during recent days have remained in the range of 33 to 34 C (92 to 94 F)– still scorching-hot for a typically much cooler city.

Overall, Japan’s oppressive heat dome hasn’t budged. And it will likely remain in place until extremely hot sea surface temperatures surrounding Japan begin to abate. As of today, there was little sign of such relief as the hot waters remained in the range of 2-4 degrees Celsius above average. And so the hot waters continued to pump both heat and moisture into the air around and over Japan, spiking wet bulb readings and creating a dangerous situation for residents not at all used to these abnormal conditions.

James Burton

Robert, With luck the collapse of oil prices will make UK fracking uneconomical in the extreme. But of course low oil prices then contribute to increased use. Fossil fuels have us in a death grip. The very idea of fracking the last green spaces of the UK is a crime of epic scale, not to mention the added CO2.
Funny how earth laid a death trap for us when all that carbon became sequestered, a good deal of it as the perfect pool of energy known as oil.

It’s a black razor for cutting one’s own neck and wrecking practically everything else in the process. Pandora’s Box, the Ring of Power, Stormbringer. The thing that if you use it or profit from it, you become possessed by it. A perfect trap for a greedy and exploitative set whose hearts are empty but for the desire of power.

Thank you. But I wasn’t the first to coin the term — the honor goes to Elaine Meinel Supkis, who used to term to describe the antics of the bankers in their never ending greed in the run up and peak of the RE bubble.

James Burton

This was the trap humanity fell into. “Future generations would face the impacts.” Now we know it is present generations who face the looming era of storms, heat waves and deadly likely feedback loops waiting to expose us to the worst imaginable.
The basic physics and chemistry of global warming and fossil fuels in not hard to grasp. Even a layman like me can gain a good working knowledge of the forces at work. WHY, is it so hard to make that type of thought Mainstream? The corporate media machine has not only failed as a source of news, it has become a tool for a powerful fossil fuel industry to squelch the facts and the data being recorded.

CP is right about costs. The main source of inertia is fossil fuel special interests getting in the way to preserve their bottom line. In other words, climate change mitigation and prevention is cheap for everyone else, financially devastating for the fossil fuel special interests. And there’s no helping that. Those interests need to go down.

I just read Joe’s fantastic article and I couldn’t agree more. There are no Dues ex Machina solutions to climate change. We have to do the good work of cutting emissions. And we have to perform that work swiftly and soon.

Loni

This heat in Japan may explain their push to restart some of their nuke plants, of which I understand, one was restarted today. I’ll bet the air conditioning units are humming over there.

Robert, regarding your last post, and the mention of Watts, Tisdale, et.al. When the bastards ‘ave got you on their ‘list’, you know you’re causin’ ’em grief. I suspect there are many of us here who have your back, at your beck and call.

Colorado Bob

LM2 –
Their base problem was the Waldo Canyon Fire . ( The Waldo Canyon fire was a forest fire that started approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Colorado Springs, Colorado on June 23, 2012 ) Burned 29 sq. miles.
Then the next summer –

Colorado Bob

You lose all that soil anchoring ground cover due to fire and then when the flood comes, as it will eventually due to the amped up hydrological cycle, then you get these great movements of earth that would not have happened without the new cycle of fire and rain.

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

In fact the overwhelming majority of research supports the reality of climate change — a 2013 review of nearly 12,000 scientific articles published between 1991 and 2011 found that of those that took a position on the issue, 97.1 percent endorsed the idea that climate change was real and human-caused. The study concluded that papers disputing climate change were “a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.”

Making Americans aware of this fact can have real effects. A study published earlier this year found that informing people of the scientific consensus on climate change “causes a significant increase in the belief that climate change is (a) happening, (b) human-caused and (c) a worrisome problem. In turn, changes in these key beliefs lead to increased support for public action.”

Vic

96 million polyethylene “shade balls” being released into the Los Angeles reservoir at the Van Norman complex in Sylmar, California. Authorities expect the balls will prevent the evaporation of 300 million gallons of water per year.

Colorado Bob

Jonzo

The shade balls will probably end up releasing vinyl chloride into the drinking water. Men solving environmental problems always end up causing more severe environmental problems over the long term. Get to the root of the problem or don’t bother.

labmonkey2

Article at VOX states that this is more to prevent the photo chemical reaction with chlorine and naturally occurring bromide in the water – creating bromate, a possible carcinogen. Not sure of this then means that some of the water was dumped in the past due to elevated levels of bromate. Interesting that evaporation reduction is a side benefit and not the major reason for this deployment, too.
Also noted that the balls are weighted with – wait for it – WATER! Whether this is potable or from some other source is not known. Hope they don’t leak?

Vic

I suspect the unintended consequences of this “solution” could include a reduction of dissolved oxygen content within the water body leading to an increase in methane emissions. I hope they’re monitoring it.

Griffin

If you’ve cut a river completely off from the Earth system, then what good can it do for the land, the airs, what vegetation is left. I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to seeing rivers and lakes enclosed. It’s the opposite of the living, connected environment we should be striving for. Although, for my part, I think solar energy can certainly be a part of that larger goal.

Colorado Bob

Unlike hurricanes or tornados, wildfires are actually a sequence of disasters that may go on for years. First is the immediate devastation of the fire itself, but that turns out to be just the start. Burned trees don’t absorb water and there is virtually no undergrowth after a fire. When a fire stays in one place for a while, the burn severity is more intense, and the oils in the trees turn into a smoke that soaks into the soil. When the fire stops, those oils become a hard waterproof crust that sheds water rather than absorbing it. At the very least, the storm water flowing down a drainage doubles compared to pre-fire flows, and in some cases, there was a tenfold increase expected.

Andy in SD

One of the side effects of displaced rain patterns.
**************************************************************

The myriad of islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland (BC) are populated. They do not have flowing rivers or major water projects as they are just islands. Now that reduced rainfall / drought conditions are kicking in a very dire situation occurs.

These people rely on wells that are replenished by rainfall. The fresh water in the wells holds salt water intrusion at bay provided withdrawals are not too much and do not upset the balance.

Now that the replenishing rains are not dependable there is nowhere to turn. Drought conditions and their side effects evolve much faster than on the mainland.

This is similar to Crete, where once a week a tanker full of water arrives. There are no alternatives.

How many other islands globally have populations that have existed in a balance with rainfall / replenishment coupled while dissuading salt water intrusion? And how many will see imbalances in that rainfall / replenishment? Will they cooperate, or will it be a race to pull water before your neighbor does?

These communities are mini experiments on what we are doing with aquifers on a much grander scale. By observing how we act / react, we can scale up the response (or lack of) to get a rough estimate on what to expect on a continental scale.

And by the time we get to the continental stage of this saga, those islands will be deserted, destitute or simply support a much smaller population, again perhaps a foreboding?

– Gad, I see Pender & Salt Spring are mentioned.
– And that ominous timeline mentioned which jibes with the breakdowns I have seen in So Cal. coast.
“Luckham has lived on Thetis Island for 27 years, and has noticed gradually reduced well levels over the last decade.”

Andy in SD

95 to 99% of species on the planet are invertebrates. We’re focused on vertebrates to determine the health of our ecosystems. However, the mortality rates and extinction rates in invertebrates should be triggering an alarm.

Granted people may think “who cares about snails and worms”, however without them, there is no us.

Mass extinction in poorly known taxa
=============================

“Since the 1980s, many have suggested we are in the midst of a massive extinction crisis, yet only 799 (0.04%) of the 1.9 million known recent species are recorded as extinct, questioning the reality of the crisis. This low figure is due to the fact that the status of very few invertebrates, which represent the bulk of biodiversity, have been evaluated. Here we show, based on extrapolation from a random sample of land snail species via two independent approaches, that we may already have lost 7% (130,000 extinctions) of the species on Earth.”

Steven Blaisdell

I think it’s more than just the number of species. If I remember my S.J. Gould, something like 95% of marine and 70% of land species went extinct in the P/T event, but around 99% of all living things died. Thus, if invertebrates are dying in large numbers, the total percentage of living things dying might be a more important metric than number of species, which might be somewhat misleading. And as you point out, centrality to biosphere functioning might be most important.

According to Ward it was closer to 96 percent of species in the ocean and 80 percent of species on land with, as you note, a 99 percent + loss of individuals. It was the only other time in which hothouse conditions occurred almost immediately after glaciation. The implied risk is both to sequestered carbon stores and due to cogeneration of hydrogen sulfide and methane in the world ocean system. Sea bed release of methane generates a mechanism for mobility of sea bed or near sea bed sulfide upward through ocean layers and toward the ocean surface.

labmonkey2

Andy in SD

That dovetails with what I was thinking about Islands being canaries in the coalmine for velocity of reaction to change and the invertebrate issue.

I wonder if we are aware of Hawaii having an issue simply because we study Hawaii a lot. Could this be reoccurring elsewhere or even in a lot of “elsewhere’s”? We may be further along than many suspect.

– Insects are basic to our very existence. Without them in our food and sustenance chain we are nothing but emaciated skeletal corpses.
This has always been so.

‘ SOIL BIOLOGY AND THE LANDSCAPE

An incredible diversity of organisms make up the soil food web. They range in size from the tiniest one-celled bacteria, algae, fungi, and protozoa, to the more complex nematodes and micro-arthropods, to the visible earthworms, insects, small vertebrates, and plants.

As these organisms eat, grow, and move through the soil, they make it possible to have clean water, clean air, healthy plants, and moderated water flow.

There are many ways that the soil food web is an integral part of landscape processes. Soil organisms decompose organic compounds, including manure, plant residue, and pesticides, preventing them from entering water and becoming pollutants. They sequester nitrogen and other nutrients that might otherwise enter groundwater, and they fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, making it available to plants. Many organisms enhance soil aggregation and porosity, thus increasing infiltration and reducing runoff. Soil organisms prey on crop pests and are food for above-ground animals.

So we’ve killed off 7 percent of species through habitat destruction, the proliferation of toxic chemicals, and the transport of invasive species. The rapid climate shifts we’ve seen so far have probably contributed as well. And, sadly, it’s just the warm up if we let fossil fuel industry keep us dependent on their products. They’re gearing us up for a second great dying that could well make the Permian look tame by comparison.

I know we’re not safe now. Take out the aerosols and we immediately have +2C above 1880s temps. That means we get the coming global superstorms.

Well I think PO will come sooner rather than later, so, yeah, even though it’s likely IMO we’d get between 4.5 amd 6.5 with peak oil, we’d still screw ourselves and cause the 6th Major Extinction if we’re still burning NatGas and Coal.

If the feedbacks are worse, i.e., more sensitive, we’d still get the Second Great Dying. (Or is it the Third, now? Turns out it was the End-Permian-like Deccan Flats / End Cretaceous global climate change that killed off the dinosaurs.)

Ed, I guess I have to keep being patient. So I’ll try this one more time.

480 CO2e ultimate warming is about 3.8 C. 40 percent of that in 10 years is 1.52 C. So that’s what you get if all the aerosols fall out and everything else stays the same in ten years.

However, stop fossil fuel burning and in ten years you also lose in the range of 200 ppb methane and 5-10 ppm CO2 as the oceans draw down. This gets up to 420-440 ppm CO2e and 3.4 C ultimate warming which is 1.36 C in ten years.

The point is that to avoid hitting the 2 C mark you really have to stop burning fossil fuels soon. And we should probably be trying for something closer to 1.5 C for this Century — which will take a cessation of fossil fuel burning. Cessation of fossil fuel burning and then some added work as well.

Okay, Robert I get your points. So the 3.8 C, etc. are above current? That’s not good.

1.36 is “okay” and 1.52 C is just shy* IF they are above 1880s values, not present. Now my hunch is that 3.4 above 1880s and 1.36 above present will cause too much of the metane clathrates to disassociate and vent up into the air, leading to that hothouse.

* Actually even 1C above 1880s values is too much IMO because of all the storms and other damages we’ve created. 0.75 target is doable if we plant lots and lots and lots of trees. I do my part by burying all the seeds that I find in the oranges I eat. New Orleans is semisubtropical, so they’ll grow.

3.8 C over about 500 years, not including amplifying feedbacks. The trick is to get under that curve as swiftly as possible. It’s a bad spot to be in. Basically behind the 8 ball, but we have time if we decide to let it work in our favor. Letting time work in our favor means rapidly cutting fossil fuels now and looking to manage all aspects for resiliency and carbon draw down over the long term. But the first step is cutting fossil fuel burning to zero ASAP. There are other steps. But they cannot be accomplished without the FF part.

Yep, it’s bad. Bad, bad, bad. And we are going to get hell even if we respond rapidly. But it’s a possibly manageable hell. Continuing to burn — that’s not manageable at all. And we need to turn that stuff off now if we’re going to have any much of a shot.

Matt

Hi Robert, again as usual for me, off topic but…. i would love to know your thoughts on the current state of GHG reduction commitments being touted at present prior to the Paris summit. I ask this for a number of reasons.
1. It seems to me that the majority of climate scientists already believe we have blown the 2C “safe limit” GHG budget,
2. I can’t really find many who even still say that 2C is safe anyway,
3. The 2030 targets seem like a woeful attempt and are at best window dressing,
4. Most countries are not even meeting their targets anyway, including my own Australia which is going in reverse.
I am sure many here are aware of the excellent presentation given by Professor Kevin Andrews relating to our greenhouse gas budget and what it actually means in reality. Link provided in case anyone hasn’t. It seems to me that if the targets being plugged at present, if agreed to, will actually be the final chapter in our response to save our only planet.

dnem

I can’t say what RS thinks about the prospects for Paris, but I, for one, think that it will fall far, far short of what is needed. We need to bring about the end of global capitalism, plain and simple. This will take a revolutionary change in the public zeitgeist across the world. There is no sustainable world that looks roughly similar to the current world, but powered by renewables. It is just not possible (or even desirable) to perpetuate (much less grow!) the scale of the human endeavor on renewables. A sustainable future will be powered by renewables, but it will also be simpler, humbler, more local and more real. THAT ain’t coming out of Paris.

wili

More specifically, we need to stop producing ANYTHING that requires ff’s to run it by 2018 at the latest. I see no one seriously talking about this. Actually, I see basically no one talking about it at all. It should be the main thing that nearly everybody in the (industrialized) world is talking about.

We’re not on the right footing. And you’re right, anything that burns fossil fuels should not be produced after a very near date. To continue to produce this infrastructure locks emissions in over the course of years and, for fixed infrastructure, decades — unless it is retired early. But once the stuff is built it becomes a sunk cost that adds to the carbon bubble. We should be trying to deflate that bubble, otherwise it will hit us hard economically when the change in perception comes.

Any country not fully committed to reducing carbon emissions by 90-100 percent over the next two to three decades is not taking the situation seriously enough.

With regards to whether or not we’ve already blown the 2 C budget for this Century. I think you’ll find a vocal minority of scientists (around 20-30 percent) who think we’ve already blown 2 C. Using ECS measures we’re at around 2 C if current atmospheric ghg levels are maintained over the course of the next century. My view is that if we let the human methane emission completely wind down and we rapidly halt the CO2 emission there’s still a window for below 2 C IF the global carbon store doesn’t feed back too strongly. That’s a big if for me. A big wild card.

But to do that, you need to go to zero emissions very, very rapidly. The nations of the world need to take this very, very seriously. Whether they act responsibly here determines the ultimate fate of civilization and of millions and billions of innocent human beings and creatures for whom this world is our only home.

So yeah anything not pushing for 90-100 percent carbon emissions reductions over the next 2-3 decades is not taking the problem seriously enough. And anyone talking 10-30 percent emissions reductions over that timeframe is really just not doing enough. I’d call that half-hearted effort given the state of the crisis. Australia’s current statement is shameful, woefully inadequate.

Current total human forcing without aerosols is 482 ppm CO2e. ECS from that forcing brings us to +1.6 C within ten to twenty years (40 percent) and +2.8 C within 100 years.

However, a rapid draw down in emissions would not only cause the human emitted aerosols to rapidly fall out, it would also rapidly bring down methane such that CO2e would fall to between 405 and 440 within 1-3 decades. Which brings us to 1.4 C and 2.1 C respectively.

IF the carbon stores don’t feedback too hard, the oceans draw down about 20 ppm worth of the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere which brings us to 385 to 420 ppm CO2e by end Century getting us more in the range of 1.9 C.

If we manage our land well and draw down additional carbon that way we could hit 365 to 405 ppm CO2e or around 1.7 C by end Century.

It would take an extraordinary effort to stay below 1.5 C. But we should probably try for that even if it’s not ultimately attainable.

As will all things, there’s a deal that we don’t know. So, luck is involved as well. But much, much better if we start sooner.

One final note on the aerosol/methane — rapid reduction of emissions brings both into play. The aerosols fall out rapidly, but so does the human produced methane. Without a rather large plume from the Arctic to cancel out the loss of the human methane plume, you end up with a rough cancellation of global dimming as the methane is taken down.

And, the good news, is we don’t yet have a plume from the Arctic large enough to maintain atmospheric methane levels if human emissions of that gas stop or are greatly reduced.

rustj2015

He was speaking in 2012. I haven’t looked for a more recent presentation…if you have a newer version of his very cold [choosing that to indicate something very dense, firm, solid] [or, all right then, searing] prognosis, it would be welcome.
As I believe I heard him say, ‘we have already pushed aside the complaints and fears of the “global south” if we’re considering 2degC *because they have no power* — it’s schadenfreude that Europe feels the burning.
And Australia will be saved by its thumbing the eye of El Nino according to its dinosaurs? I think not.

redskylite

I can’t see see Donald Trump as a supporter of the World Wildlife Fund, but they are supporting the borderlands best they can.

“We are going to have heavy rains, maybe in shorter bursts. When that happens, the water has no time to infiltrate the ground, so the soil starts flowing away with the water. Soil erosion,” he says, “is to nature like cancer is for humans. It destroys little by little. ”

Colorado Bob

Three Years of Rain Falls in 12 Hours as Deadly Storm Causes Flooding, Mudslides in Chile

Antofagasta, Chile, saw 0.55 inches (14 mm) of rain in just 12 hours Saturday into Sunday. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually more than three years worth of rain for this town where the average annual rainfall is just 0.14 inches (3.8 mm).

The unusual rains caused deadly flooding and mudslides just to the north of Antofagasta in the town of Tocopilla. According to Chile’s National Office of Emergency of the Interior Ministry, at least three people are dead and one more is missing due to the flooding.

This is the second time in 2015 that this part of Chile has seen unusual rain amounts. In March, Antofagasta saw an even heavier bout of rainfall with 0.96 inches (24.4 mm) falling during the 24 hour period ending at 8 a.m. EDT March 26. That bout of rainfall also resulted in deadly flooding and was named our strangest weather event of 2015, so far.

“The Arctic became warmer and wetter since the beginning of the 21st century, a self-reinforcing trend likely to continue because it is linked to sea-ice melt and more persistent open-water conditions in the world’s northern ocean, a newly published study concludes.

Data from NASA shows that average surface temperatures across the Arctic Ocean increased an average of 0.16 degrees Celsius per year from 2003 to 2013, and air temperatures rose 0.09 degrees Celsius annually over the same period, says the study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters.”

Colorado Bob

An extended heat wave is smashing all-time records in parts of Europe for the second time this summer, and may remain in place into next week.

Triple-digit heat prompted Poland’s national supplier to cut electricity to factories for several hours Monday. The combination of this extended heat plus dry weather has left rivers used to cool Poland’s power plants running low.

redskylite

“Chances are you’ve never heard the phrase “danger day” when it comes to weather. That’s because they’re rare. You’ll want to get to know it, though, because climate change is about to make them a lot more common over the next 15 years.”

redskylite

“Waves, currents, storms and people all move the sand that make beaches, well, beaches. But a combination of rising sea levels, stronger coastal storms and coastal development means that sandy shorelines are increasingly disappearing, leaving the millions who live there facing major challenges in a warming world.”

redskylite

In a stinging letter to The Australian newspaper, which ran the half-page advert, the APS said the authors had shown “cognitive biases” in ignoring a “huge body of scientific evidence” on climate change. DeSmog has found the group members have links to mining, finance, agriculture and free market “think tank” the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).